A little about AMF and MediaWhiz

AMF Bowling Centers, Inc. is the world's largest owner and operator of bowling centers, with over 285 centers in the United States. In 2010, AMF Bowling set a goal of increasing revenues from its online coupon redemption program, and subsequently turned to MediaWhiz for help with campaign strategy, design, and execution.

MediaWhiz, a Hyper Marketing Inc. company, was founded in 2001 and has rapidly become a leading online performance marketing agency that helps clients acquire customers more profitably. MediaWhiz specializes in combining all forms of online performance marketing (Affiliate, Search, Social, Display, Email and Data Acquisition) for a broad range of leading advertisers. MediaWhiz has standardized on Marin Software as its platform for managing and optimizing paid search.

"We’ve customized Marin to our specifc needs creating a client solution that drives efficiency through the automation of bid management and offine revenue pass back for ROAS 360 degree measurement. Marin’s fexibility and willingness to work with us and RevTrax to take advantage of custom data integration opportunities for our clients has further enhanced our reporting and optimization capabilities.”

- Kaleb Ernest / Search Marketing Operations Manager / MediaWhiz

Challenge

AMF Bowling’s online marketing campaign is unique in that AMF Bowling needs to entice customers to visit a local bowling center rather than simply encourage them to purchase an item online or download a piece of collateral. With over 285 bowling centers across the country, AMF Bowling utilizes coupon offers to drive customers to a nearby location. The company found tailoring paid search campaigns for local offers to be extremely time consuming as each campaign requires the localization of thousands of keywords, adjustments to geo-targeting settings, and customization of coupon offers in ad creative.

Tracking the effectiveness of search marketing also proved difficult since coupons were redeemed offline. Consequently, AMF Bowling needed a tool that could integrate offline conversion data from RevTrax –a coupon analytics platform – with campaign data from the search engines to accurately analyze return on advertising spend (ROAS). Moreover, the team needed a tool that could provide the necessary workflow to manage the complexity of nearly three hundred local campaigns.

Solution

MediaWhiz used Marin Software with the AMF Bowling campaign because of Marin’s ability to integrate with RevTrax. With this integration, AMF Bowling was able to accurately track the effectiveness of the coupon redemption program and pinpoint which bowling centers were the most profitable. Marin also provided the ability to efficiently scale a local program.

Marin automated entire AMF Bowling bidding and geo-targeting process while also allowing MediaWhiz to more effectively build and edit ad copy for each AMF Bowling geographical region. MediaWhiz then utilized Marin’s dimensions feature to report on the effectiveness of each AMF Bowling coupon offer across all locations, allowing AMF Bowling to understand which offers and geographies performed the best. This automation and other workflow efficiencies provided MediaWhiz with more time to test new strategies, creative, and targeting criteria for AMF Bowling.

Results

MediaWhiz’s integral use of Marin Software allowed the marketing agency to succeed straight out of the gate with AMF Bowling’s search marketing campaign. The flexibility of Marin’s platform permitted offline conversion data to be factored in for accurate campaign analysis, while automated bid management and improved workflow increased overall campaign performance.

After 6 months, monthly revenue attributed to search marketing was more than 10 times higher than revenue in the first month of the program. Over nine months, AMF Bowling’s conversion rate jumped 74% and cost per conversion (CPC) dropped nearly 70%.